Weapons Man

Sure enough, that’s what we’ve got here, in a clip from last year on Hunan TV. Tai Chi Master Wang Zhanhai goes into China’s most modern fencing center to match his skills against a young fencing expert, Coach Liu. The video is in Chinese with English subtitles (note that “taiji” is just the modern Mandarin transliteration of the old-style Tai Chi). Can open hands defeat a sword? On the sword’s home ground?

Ah, Killadelphia, the City of Brotherly Fratricide. The gentleman in the photo elected to redistribute the wealth of the depositors of the Susquehanna Bank to the poor, to wit, his ownself. Normally, one would expect the bank employees to politely decline any such request, but this worthy thought to bring a persuasive artifact to sway them to his way of thinking. And Lo! and behold, it worked: just like every November, it turns out there are ways for the non-working class to avail themselves of the assets of the working chumps class. Just brandish a grenade, and riches beyond measure are yours for the asking. Of course, so is the persistent interest of the FBI, but there’s always a cloud wrapped around every silver lining, right?

Lots of ICE special agents are finding time on their hands, given that the current Administration does not want to deport criminal aliens — or even to arrest or charge them. So what are they doing? Making sure nobody disses their favorite sports teams!

Watervliet Arsenal, where this cannon was once displayed, comes up in this story. But this cannon wasn’t made at Watervliet. It was captured from Johnny Burgoyne!

Who’s CARL? Well, he’s an acronym, as the capitals should have hinted to you. CARL is the Army’s Combined Arms Reference Library. It is open to the public, worldwide, and is a great source of Army doctrine, Army history, and technical reports. (In fact, tomorrow’s first post willl be a historical one, based on a document from this library. We needed a one-day break from the 1970s and missiles, and will resume Friday with Arab-Israeli unpleasantness).

A small fire started at a home Tuesday after a man used a blow torch in an attempt to melt ice off the siding of his house, a fire official said.
Firefighters were called to 11 Bradley Lane around 9:30 a.m. after the siding near the front door caught fire, according to North Hampton Fire Lt. Peter Francis.
Francis said the fire spread into the sill and burnt “8-10 inches” into the subfloor of the house. The area of the fire was not large, Francis said, and the man had used buckets of water to extinguish most of it before firefighters arrived.
The damage was limited to the lower area near the door of the house.
Francis said the Fire Department conducted an overhaul to ensure it would not re-ignite.
According to Francis, the man used the blow torch to melt the ice because he was replacing siding on the house.

via Man using blow torch to melt ice starts small house fire – News – seacoastonline.com – Portsmouth, NH.

You have an opinion on Bowe Bergdahl, no doubt. We have an opinion on him, too, and on the feckless swap that returned Taliban leaders to the fight in return for a traitor. We have an opinion about the folks in that the National Capital Area who received this weasel with more respect than anyone in that city has lately mustered for those soldiers who, unlike Bergdahl, kept the faith.

In 1972, ATGMs had been in military inventories for 20 years, since France’s adoption of the SS-10 circa 1951. But they’d never fulfilled their original mission — destruction of enemy tanks in combat. Sure, some of the French missiles might have been popped off an insurgent sangars in Algeria, and Americans shot a couple of Entacs at bunkers in Vietnam. And a dozen missile models had blown hell out of obsolete tanks on a firing range. But nobody had shot one at a hostile tank containing a hostile crew.

It looks in this mugshot as if she is the one that was drowned. Unfortunately, no.

Stone, circa 1946.

We’ve discussed the original German developments on wire-guided missiles, and the way the US Army didn’t pick uo on them until it was imagining its ultimate tank-killer in the late 1950s. That missile program was rolled into one of Robert S. Macnamara’s grandiose schemes, the international MBT-70 tank, that was going to be the best tank in the world by such a margin that all NATO would adopt it. (Instead, it wound up being a bitter, painful and costly learning experience for the US and Germany).

In 1945, Allied investigators pouring over the ruins of German missile research programs found enough information that France, America, Britain and Russia would launch programs of their own. One unexpected discovery was that Germans had taken an functional approach to missile control from a launch or near-launch station via trailing electrical wires. These wire-guided missile technologies were used in both developmental and deployed weapons by the Germans.

With much trepidation, your humble blog will attend Blogbrother’s Superbowl party. Why trepidation? Football moves us not, although we plan to enjoy the ads. But Sister-in-Law is a dyed-in-the-wool Patriots fan, to the point where a Pats defeat today will have us put her on something like suicide watch.

We’re now three for five on TW3s for 2015. We’ve been a little late posting them.

We’ve already reviewed one of Amazon’s should-we-or-shouldn’t-we pilots, Cocked. (We were pretty ambivalent about it, mostly because we don’t trust Amazon, based on past performance, to deal with the gun-culture central to the story fairly or even competently). Now we’re on to the pilot that seems to be getting the most buzz, and therefore, the one most likely to turn into a series: The Man in the High Castle. This 60s alt-history period piece is based on a Philip K. Dick story, the one sure way to get Science Fiction or Spec Fiction funded in Hollyweird.

Again, these show nothing like scientific testing, and they seem to be hard to make anything out, whether that’s deliberate or accidental, we can’t say.

Such was a British headline a century ago. after Germany released poison gas on French Algerian troops in May, 1914. But the Hun actually introduced posion gas into warfare 100 years ago today, making today the centenary of WMD.

We have a soft spot in our heart for the M14 rifle, even though we experienced it in the service primarily as the M21 sniper system, a fiddly, unstable platform with, “no user serviceable parts inside.” (Seriously. The operator was not permitted to field-strip the gun — that was strictly for the armorers who built the thing. You could swab out the bore, but they’d rather you didn’t). Some of the fiddliness was caused by the Leatherwood ART II scope, an early bullet drop compensator telescopic sight. The Leatherwood was adopted, we always suspected, because Jim Leatherwood had been an SF guy, not because the scope was incredibly great. The replacement of the M21 with the M24 bolt gun, a gun that was developed primarily by SF marksmen (snipers and competitive shooters), was met by hosannas. Its Leupold mildot scope took the onus off the scope’s internals and put it on the shooter, and we liked that.

Geez, look at how the cops talk about this guy. “Suspected Aryan Brotherhood member.” And they say they think he’s a “member of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood.” They’re “working to confirm it.”